[HN Gopher] A Swedish startup's bid to build a green rival to AWS
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A Swedish startup's bid to build a green rival to AWS
Author : foolswisdom
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-06-09 21:32 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sifted.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sifted.eu)
| eagleoftruth wrote:
| Has "Europe is investing $X billions to rival
| $AMERICAN_TECH_GIANT" ever worked? I'm highly skeptical of
| planned enterprises. Inovation often happens organically.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It works better when they use Legislation to keep the great
| satan in check.
|
| They're addicted to that market and they(we?) need checks and
| balances to constrain that which we have wrought
| dopidopHN wrote:
| Airbus ?
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| US cloud companies are just a subsidiary of the NSA, so this
| sounds good.
| cheriot wrote:
| > "Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US
| authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American
| citizens. That means that many companies and authorities in
| Europe cannot put sensitive data on the American cloud and
| instead store it on servers in the cellar," Astrom says.
|
| Isn't this FUD? US authorities can't subpoena data on a server in
| the EU even if it's owned by a US company
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Anything which passes through cloudflare, AWS, Apple, or any
| corporation with an HQ in America is part and parcel of the
| American 3 letter industry
| Gwypaas wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the CLOUD act, which multiple times
| have been ruled to be fundamentally incompatible with GDPR.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
| kixiQu wrote:
| Curious to see whether pessimism about big-$$$ companies
| getting to shape US law to their will could win versus
| pessimism about the seemingly inevitable creep of the
| security state, if Europe actually forces tech companies'
| hands here... one can kind of imagine it being possible to
| repeal the CLOUD act if enough lobbyist dollars were spent.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| > green ambitious, applaudable, but doomed to market realities
| KomoD wrote:
| I kind of struggled to find the name of the company in the start
| of the article.
|
| Turns out its https://evroc.com
| dgellow wrote:
| It's in the subheading:
|
| > Having just raised a EUR13m pre-seed round, evroc aims to
| raise EUR3bn within the next two years
| Someone wrote:
| And in the first paragraph and in the third paragraph, in the
| fifth, etc. I count twelve occurrences.
|
| I think it doesn't pop out because it's written without
| capital letters.
| melx wrote:
| This must be the biggest-paddings-between-blocks website ever.
| At least for mobile.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| They left room for the solar panels to power the DCs
| strictfp wrote:
| I'm interested to hear their business plan, given that there's
| already established ones like https://elastx.se/en/, and they're
| not running terribly well, although they have quite a good
| product IMO.
| poisonborz wrote:
| > When the sun is shining in Spain, then we move the data there,
| and when the wind is blowing in the Netherlands then we move it
| there.
|
| I'm sure this sounds great for the laymen and politicians, but
| does it really make sense technically?
| datadeft wrote:
| Not really
| eptcyka wrote:
| No. Nothing beats a truck full of drives for bandwidth, nothing
| beats fiber for latency, they need both.
| neximo64 wrote:
| Would never use a cloud service simply because "its European",
| it's got to be better and cheaper than AWS.
| wmf wrote:
| US clouds will be banned in EU so it's a captive market.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Interesting. Any sources on this?
| capableweb wrote:
| Seems they're aiming to capture the market of people who want
| "green" clouds, not "European" clouds. Besides, if you just
| want better and cheaper AWS, there is so many options already.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| Doesn't look like being a green cloud will be a
| differentiator for very long.
|
| "Amazon is the world's largest corporate purchaser of
| renewable energy and is on a path to powering our operations
| with 100% renewable energy by 2025"
|
| https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/environment/renewable.
| ..
| adrian_mrd wrote:
| This is for Amazon as a whole (so not AWS) but recent news
| (26 May 2023) seems that they are targeting net-zero by
| 2040:
|
| "The ecommerce giant recently backed out of a commitment to
| make 50% of its shipments net-zero carbon by 2030. Amazon
| said in a statement that it would roll this goal into a
| broader Climate Pledge to reach net-zero carbon across all
| its operations by 2040. That's a decade later than the 50%
| goal, which was called "Shipment Zero" at the time." [0]
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-shipment-zero-
| gives-u...
|
| Also worth noting that this is a target. And targets can
| always shift eg 2040, 2050, etc
| gumballindie wrote:
| A lot of european companies would. You'd be surprised how often
| saas clients told me to _never_ allow client data to get
| anywhere near a us company. People around europe are very
| privacy aware.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It's something most Americans don't appreciate. Half of
| Europe suffered under or from a totalitarian regime not that
| long ago and set up their respective barriers.
|
| Some people give it lip service in America for political
| points but they don't understand it on a fundamental level -
| most of them would turn around and complain about why google
| street view doesn't work in Germany.
|
| I say this as someone who has bounced around between both
| sides of the pond
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| I wonder what kind of talent they will be able to hire, paying
| the usual European taxed peanuts.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| People choose to live in Europe for reasons other than money.
| Things money can't buy.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| They can give out stock? Being taken for a ride is being
| taken for a ride.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| Basal capitalistic view. What's the most beautiful city
| you've ever visited and why?
| _dain_ wrote:
| a beautiful retirement home is still a retirement home.
|
| you either grow your own economy or become a vassal to
| someone else who does.
|
| if europe keeps stagnating and america keeps posting 4%
| gdp growth, a day will come when the EU can pass as many
| laws as they like and it won't matter. it'll be like some
| shitpoor latin american country against united fruit.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| "economy" is a meme - both china and the EU (and actually
| the saudis/arab-oil world) realized that this anglo-
| american system has its weaknesses which can be exploited
|
| The Chinese did it by just taking all the IP they could
| get as a requirement to sell in their nation The
| Europeans did it by requiring companies to abide by their
| new law or pay out fines(basically a quasitax) The Arabs
| did it by making billions per day in oil and buying
| everyone's sports clubs up
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| foolswisdom wrote:
| They want to create competing to US cloud companies in Europe. If
| I understand the business strategy as presented they initially
| will target companies that can't use US cloud for legal reasons,
| so US clouds can't even compete (so the competition while they
| get off the ground is small scale cloud providers in Europe),
| which will then give them a base from which to fight the big
| clouds for clients.
|
| Quick googling says that AWS, Azure and GCP have 69% of the
| European cloud market. I wonder how big Europe is for their
| overall profits, and if this could potentially be a big problem
| for then in the future.
| scroot wrote:
| The market share of these services in the EU might end up being
| affected by the passage of the Digital Services Act and its
| sister bill the Digital Markets Act
| carlosjobim wrote:
| It should be embarrassing for Europeans that the only way they
| can compete with Americans in IT is by literally banning US
| products. I don't think that will work out very well for them
| in the long run. Europe is otherwise usually a fierce
| competitor in high tech, but when it comes to IT it seems they
| didn't really got going strong. Just out of sheer patriotism,
| European companies could snatch back a lot of customers from
| their foreign competitors by just offering an equal or slightly
| worse product.
| nikanj wrote:
| EU is pouring huge amounts of money into development grants,
| because they want to decrease their dependency on the global
| markets.
|
| Expect GAaaS startups (grant applications as a service) to pop
| up left and right, offering extremely slick pitch decks,
| founders in well-fitting suits and ridiculous pie-in-the-sky
| business ideas.
|
| It's some version of "build it and they will come". Granting
| millions in free money to anyone who promises to create an EU
| alternative to AWS / Intel / Facebook gets you a lot of said
| promises.
| belval wrote:
| > Over the next two years, it plans to raise EUR3bn -- that
| averages out as EUR125m a month for everyone keeping score at
| home
|
| The EU pledged EUR2bn so it's mostly government funding.
| Imagine burning EUR125m in public money every month.
| datadeft wrote:
| Good luck, they gonna need it.
| prepend wrote:
| I think there's an opportunity for an IkeaCloud or AldiCloud that
| is just barebones and cheap but still is a proper cloud.
|
| Given that Microsoft and google are struggling to match aws it
| seems we're still decades away from someone truly being able to
| deliver the same features, scale, and reliability.
| ju-st wrote:
| "LidlCloud" is a thing... https://www.stackit.de/en/
| digitallyfree wrote:
| Wouldn't that be Hetzner?
| asciimike wrote:
| Doesn't this already exist in the form of Digital Ocean,
| Linode/Akamai, OVH, etc.?
| f_devd wrote:
| Those are not cheap, but they do exist already yes
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| also hetzner
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Sounds interesting, but It's a shame that they only hire you if
| you're willing to relocate to Sweden.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| If the concern mentioned in this article of "Americans can view
| sensitive data on European citizens," they should just go the
| route China did - it hosts its own version of AWS that's pretty
| walled off, from what I know.
| niederman wrote:
| Well, yeah, that's what evroc is aiming to be.
| asciimike wrote:
| China was able to pressure the west to do so because western
| companies:
|
| - "need" to operate in China
|
| - The Chinese government requires majority state ownership of
| enterprises
|
| I don't think the conditions are the same in Europe, especially
| given the historical precedents of Safe Harbor/Privacy
| Shield/etc.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| ~250x in two years? Starting with a 13m pre-seed round? Does this
| make any sense?
| nilespotter wrote:
| > "Amazon, Google and Microsoft are really good, but US
| authorities have the right to see the data stored on non-American
| citizens."
|
| Unfortunately Mattias, they don't care if they have the right or
| not. American citizens are routinely subject to surveillance,
| dragnet and otherwise. I'd be very surprised if any of your data
| centers stay out of view of our unconscionable surveillance
| apparatus.
| mr90210 wrote:
| A lot of "US vs Europe" in the comments. The focus ought to be to
| provide great services rather than just "it's built here and not
| there".
|
| I use Hetzner over other providers because it's dead simple to
| create and delete VMs and the prices are competitive ... and yes
| it's a European company.
|
| The EU flag alone is not enough - Stable services, great UX and
| second to none support is the alternative that the market has
| been longing.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| It sounds like it's layering on the European aspect to get
| government/EU backing. Fair enough, I hope they succeed.
| dontupvoteme wrote:
| It's a necessary evil to combat a larger one.
| belval wrote:
| Corporate fluff aside, AWS is on track to run on 100% renewables
| by 2025[1] so the selling is mostly "European cloud" since the
| green part will be mostly expected by the time they actually ramp
| up. Competition is always good though.
|
| > Studies by 451 Research have shown that AWS' infrastructure is
| 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of U.S.
| enterprise data centers surveyed and up to five times more energy
| efficient than the average in Europe. 451 Research also found
| that AWS can lower customers' workload carbon footprints by
| nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers, and up
| to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy--a target
| we're on path to meet by 2025.
|
| [1] https://aws.amazon.com/energy/sustainability/
|
| EDIT: - GCP, 100% renewable by 2030
| https://cloud.google.com/sustainability - Azure, 100%
| renewable by 2025 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-
| us/explore/global-infrastructure/sustainability -
| Oracle, 100% renewable in Europe already
| https://www.oracle.com/sustainability/green-cloud/
| IceWreck wrote:
| Well we already have Hetzner and OVH which are European so just
| being European does not give them a selling point over others.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Neither are even remotely close to competing with AWS, GCP or
| Azure in terms of features though, they are more server
| providers than anything else.
|
| And OVH is a dumpster fire.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Not just the dumpsters, the datacenters too!
| boulos wrote:
| Disclosure: I used to work on GCE.
|
| "Renewable" is a broad set of terms. Importantly from your
| first link on GCP it says:
|
| > Google is carbon neutral for our operations today, but aiming
| higher: our goal is to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7, at all
| of our data centers by 2030.
|
| Carbon-free, 24x7, is a stronger commitment than carbon-neutral
| which would include using renewable power offsets. Amazon's
| methodology is at
| https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/renewable-energy-meth...
| which makes this clear as well.
| api wrote:
| For real or are they purchasing dodgy "offsets?"
| Bang2Bay wrote:
| offset is what its name suggests. sometimes its ok if a
| company innovates or pays money to others to innovate.
| vladf wrote:
| Sure, but the reasons offsets are dodgy is because they
| actually aren't fungible in the way you're hoping for.
|
| Say a paper maker is about to cut down a forest in the US.
| It buys up the rights to do so for $1M. Then, instead, it
| sells $1M worth of carbon credits to Amazon (maybe for a
| premium) for its data center greenwashing and doesn't end
| up cutting the US forest.
|
| But then, secretly, or through some shell company
| machinery, it buys a plot of land in the Amazon and cuts
| trees down anyway to match its demand. Even though US law
| makers evaluate the counterfactual of the paper maker
| cutting trees down in the US, the net amount of trees in
| the world goes down.
| belval wrote:
| Doesn't have to be that complicated to be dodgy. A bunch
| of carbon offset works on optimistic to downright stupid
| metrics for carbon capture.
|
| For example they buy a plot of land and then raze it,
| then they will plant 10k saplings and take that figure at
| face value even if most of those won't take and actually
| become trees.
|
| Then they will estimate the CO2 captured by averaging it
| over the entire life of the tree (say 30 years) and count
| year 1 as if it captured 1/30 of the CO2 even though the
| carbon capture potential of tree is not constant
| throughout its life.
|
| Beyond that they will double count the carbon credits of
| the plot of land by selling them twice.
|
| Finally after all the above, they will sell the plots
| after ~5 years to buy some other plots and it will be
| razed anyway. No one actually checks that the carbon
| capture forest will be there in 10 years, let alone 30.
| belval wrote:
| Probably a bit of both, but their competition in this article
| is unproven and unbuilt data centers. Ultimately DCs don't
| exist in a vaccum, if the energy in Europe makes it possible
| to be 100% renewables without dodgy offsets then everyone
| will be, not just evroc. If it's not possible then nothing in
| the articles gives me the impression that they have a secret
| sauce that would make their 100% renewables "true 100%".
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| This is made perfectly obvious by "running on 100%
| renewables".
|
| You can see more details on https://sustainability.aboutamazo
| n.com/environment/renewable...
|
| It's when there are mentions of "net zero" that carbon
| credits are purchased (which Amazon does too, but not for
| what we're talking about).
| apendleton wrote:
| They're still pretty squirrelly about the specifics of
| their commitment, though. In particular, it's not clear if
| it's hourly accounting (but the fact that they don't say so
| suggests to me that it isn't), and there doesn't seem to be
| any discussion of additionality. In other words: it might
| be that exactly the same amount of renewable generation,
| and exactly the same amount of fossil-fuel generation, are
| going to occur with this pledge as would have without, and
| this is just shuffling some numbers between columns in a
| spreadsheet.
| conradev wrote:
| It's a lot of renewables:
|
| > The top 25 corporate solar users in 2022 include:
|
| > Meta
|
| > Amazon
|
| > Apple
|
| > Walmart
|
| > Microsoft
|
| https://www.seia.org/news/solarmeansbusiness2022
|
| Just as one data point
| troyvit wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted, the efficacy of
| carbon offsets is debatable:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/greenwas.
| ..
|
| https://earth.org/is-carbon-offset-a-form-of-greenwashing/
|
| And there are plenty of dodgy players out there that large
| organizations use:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed.
| ..
|
| And there are plenty of government programs that just don't
| work:
|
| https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-
| planting...
|
| I'm sitting here asking myself how much Amazon cares about
| that, but also wondering how the "unknown Swedish startup"
| will approach being green.
| BSEdlMMldESB wrote:
| they seem to have misunderstood the why and the how of startup
| culture in the valley
|
| it has been a way to get startup entrepreneurs (founders) to
| absorb the negative cost of trying out new things; and whatever
| actually works well gets bought by an established winner.
|
| what's fundamentally unproven about how to build data-centers?
| this seems to be about using a different sort of 'power supply'
| for the whole project
|
| what is to stop AWS from being even more green even faster (by
| buying 'greener' power supplies?)
|
| the only way this makes sense is if their real end-game is to get
| bought by some already established datacenter company.
|
| then again, it's not 2018 anymore. The VC scheme is also changing
| a lot. they should find a way to chuck "AI" in their pitch to get
| startup money now
| nikanj wrote:
| Their real end game is living comfortably for years on large
| salaries financed by EU development grants.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| They are taking advantage of regulatory capture - that's all. I
| don't think I'm blaming anybody here. Maybe these are good
| regulations. Regardless, it creates a business opportunity.
|
| The EU passes laws which require data/compute/whatever to run
| in the EU. So a company springs up with a product for that.
| commitpizza wrote:
| There is already a grest swedish cloud peovider called GleSYS.
| They are 100% running on renewable energy and the have an awesome
| control panel to control your servers. I only wish that they had
| more hosted solutions like digital ocean.
|
| Other than that, there is hetzner which I also use and is very
| good and probably the cheapest cloud provider out there. Then
| there is the french ovh.
| java-man wrote:
| Oh boy, this one is not cheap: VPS hosting, for example, is
| 2x..4x than that of DotBlock.
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(page generated 2023-06-09 23:00 UTC)